This story is part of an ongoing POLITICO series on how national policy issues are affecting the 2014 midterm elections.

Statehood and corruption used to be the talk of this town, but for the third straight election cycle, education issues are dominating Washington, D.C.’s mayoral race.

The candidates are duking it out over who will best steer D.C. public schools, which are at a crossroads after years of painful overhaul kicked off by former Chancellor Michelle Rhee. The city is changing, fast: It’s become home to more white, middle- and upper-class families while simultaneously emerging as a poster child for urban school reform. And parents in all corners of the city are clamoring for more from their schools.

Mayoral candidate David Catania, an independent on the City Council, is seizing the opportunity. He’s betting his record on the Council and granular knowledge of education issues will give him an edge against fellow Council member Muriel Bowser, who holds the coveted Democratic nomination but tends to talk in generalities, both on the stump and in interviews. As tension mounts, Bowser — who has largely avoided engaging with Catania’s aggressive campaign style — has said this could be the “nastiest” campaign fight in the city’s history.

Urban school districts that are run by mayors, like D.C.’s, are grappling with fundamental questions of equality. Despite billions spent on improvements and reforms in cities including Washington, Chicago and New York City, the districts remain a patchwork of schools, some with national recognition, others with notoriously poor test scores and reputations.

The course that leaders in each city will chart has the potential to affect whether those divisions, and access to a high-quality education, remain based on race and class.

In D.C., current Mayor Vincent Gray set the stage for a blowout over education. In April, he floated options for fixing uneven enrollment in the city, which has crowded some schools and left others underused. Many parents cried foul, fearing they would be forced to send their children to low-quality schools while others complained they have never had high-quality choices.

“I want a rock-solid commitment to creating schools that serve neighborhoods,” said Evelyn Boyd Simmons, a parent and former Capitol Hill aide who has been a vocal opponent of Gray’s proposals.

Catania and Bowser say they would bring Gray’s school plan to a halt if elected, although, arguably, neither has specifics on how they would resolve the issue of uneven enrollment.

The sitting mayor’s proposals also triggered a larger debate over how the school system should evolve now that enrollment and tax revenue are on the rebound. D.C. schools have been under mayoral control since 2007, when then-newly elected Mayor Adrian Fenty won the power to take over the troubled system. Fenty installed Rhee, a relative unknown who quickly set about transforming the district by growing the charter system, overhauling the teachers union contract and closing nearly two dozen low-performing schools.

Rhee quickly became a lightning rod in the national education reform debate, appearing on the cover of Time magazine and later in a PBS documentary. The school closings — which involved firing hundreds of teachers — contributed to Fenty’s loss in the 2010 elections.

But the way students enroll in schools hasn’t evolved: D.C. students can attend a neighborhood school, apply for an open slot at a school in another neighborhood or try the charter lottery. Charters enroll 45 percent of the district’s 81,000 students — the third-highest percentage in the country — but students attending charters or schools outside their neighborhoods may face long commutes. And some charters have lengthy wait lists: Two Rivers Public Charter School had 1,722 students on its wait list as of April — but has space for only 520 students.

Gray’s changes would shuffle boundaries for neighborhood schools and the enrollment process — possibly taking away the guarantee that students can enroll in their neighborhood school.

Bowser and Catania say that rather than carry out Gray’s proposals, they would work on improving neighborhood schools enough that most parents will want to send their kids to nearby schools, making sweeping boundary changes unnecessary.

But Bowser fumbled. She sent a news release indicating support for many of Gray’s ideas — including one that would affect students’ right to attend schools closest to home. She quickly tweaked her position as public opposition to Gray’s plans became clear.

She now says she could be open to changing the assignment process but strongly supports maintaining neighborhood schools, and she insists this has always been her position. She’s called on Gray to take his proposition slow.

Catania has planned a council hearing June 26 on Gray’s school plans and launched a campaign group called Public School Parents for Catania.

He has served as chairman of the education committee for the past two years and zealously dives into conversation on the nitty-gritty details of D.C. schools, peppering his talk with school performance stats and the names of principals he has gotten to know during visits to more than 130 schools. As he spoke in a recent interview, his energetic dog — a frequent companion on the campaign trail — bounded through the halls of his campaign office in a white and blue “Catania for Mayor” T-shirt.

But Catania is still a long-shot candidate, despite garnering attention from the press even before his campaign launched. D.C. has been electing mayors for 40 years, and in a city where identity politics matter, Bowser — an African-American Democrat — has a steep advantage.

Bowser can boast of winning upgrades for the two high schools in her ward, Coolidge and Roosevelt. She said she wants to focus on improving the district’s middle schools — to give everyone the option of attending a school like the district’s coveted Alice Deal middle school in the wealthy Tenleytown area.

She won a low-turnout primary in April by slamming Gray, the target of a federal investigation, over ethics questions. The even, measured Bowser has run largely on being a candidate who cares about “all eight wards” of the district — a campaign rally refrain — emphasizing her commitment to education, good jobs and affordable housing in her neighborhood.

She proposes adding a neighborhood preference for parents applying to charter schools so students living near a charter would have an edge in lotteries. It’s a stance that could win support from families in charter-heavy areas but anger other parents.

Catania doesn’t hesitate to pan Bowser’s platform, saying her plans are “platitudes” that don’t include any “evidence-based solutions” for the city. Replicating Alice Deal’s features may not work at a school serving many students from low-income families.

Bowser declined to comment on Catania or his platform. But she poked at her opponent’s long odds, noting that his races for his city council seat haven’t pitted him against a Democrat — his at-large seat is reserved for non-Democrats — and that he’s “up against somebody who’s been on the ballot” in the mayoral race.

She opted out of a debate that a charter schools group wanted to host in June, saying she will wait until after the August deadline for candidates to enter the race. Catania is considered the only legitimate challenger, though Green Party and libertarian candidates are running, and he still has to collect the requisite 3,000 voter signatures before August to get on the ballot.

Catania, who is white, is the council’s first openly gay member, but he doesn’t want to be known as the gay candidate. After raising money for George W. Bush, Catania quit the GOP over gay rights issues. He bristled when asked about catalyzing D.C.’s powerful gay community for support, saying the idea that someone would vote solely on demographics is “revolting.” Then he changed the subject.

Running against Gray’s proposed school boundary changes will be popular with voters in Ward 3, home of the desirable Alice Deal and Wilson High School. This northwestern corner of the district is predominantly white and boasts many of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods — the median price for a single-family home was just shy of $1.1 million in 2012. And its parents are politically savvy: Some have run campaigns, lobbied on bills and worked as aides on Capitol Hill.

Changing the school assignment process to give parents more choice on where to send their children could promote integration and address crowding, said Michael Petrilli, executive vice president at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank. But it could also create a sense of uncertainty at a moment when confidence in the schools appears to be building, he said. He added that such a move could “unintentionally stop the gentrification” of neighborhoods where property values are high in part because of proximity to good schools.

More students are performing at grade level today than in the past, but D.C. school performance still lags behind other cities. And big disparities remain by race and school. While 60 percent of seniors at Wilson High School — where 31 percent of the students come from low-income families and 75 percent score on grade level for reading, only 20 percent of seniors do so at Anacostia High School, where 99 percent of students come from poor families. Wilson offers honors classes, junior ROTC and a dance ensemble; Anacostia has none of those.

Some D.C. parents are irked that the rich could steer the system.

“I’ve become convinced that it is going to be almost impossible for Washington, D.C., to preserve boundary rights for schools without those being co-opted by those who want to protect privilege,” said Conor Williams, a D.C. parent and education policy analyst at the New America Foundation. He sees parents in his neighborhood — part of Bowser’s ward — becoming “highly active and highly vocal” about opposing the boundary changes and building a new local middle school.

Parents “can see that student achievement is improving … so they feel a little more confident and in a safer position,” said George Parker, head of the D.C. teachers union from 2005 to 2010 and now a senior fellow at Rhee’s education reform group StudentsFirst.

But teachers are concerned about discipline issues and persistently low performance among black male students, Parker said — and the next mayor will need to focus on the inequalities that remain if he or she wants to be the mayor for “the whole city.”

The candidates will be jockeying for votes in the northwestern part of the city, but winning votes in the less-affluent, less-vocal eastern half of the city may be just as crucial — if not more so.

Eboni-Rose Thompson, who chairs the Ward 7 Education Council in the district’s southeastern quadrant, sees both candidates trying to lure votes from her neighborhood. Ward 7 has a substantial school-age population but few neighborhood schools — many have been closed in recent years as students opted for charters. Thompson, who drives her niece 20 minutes to a charter school each morning, says more high-quality neighborhoods are needed to serve families who can’t do the same.

Another key decision for the next mayor will be whether to extend the contract of Kaya Henderson, the current chancellor and Rhee’s former top lieutenant.

Catania has praised Henderson’s work but is noncommittal about whether he would keep her on, saying it’s “not appropriate to weigh in” before an election.

Bowser said the first meeting she took after her primary win was with Henderson — and she hinted that she’d try to keep Henderson in place.

“There’s some legwork I want to do in talking to stakeholders and reviewing what’s working,” Bowser said. “But I value consistency in moving forward with our schools.”

She also pledged to continue reforms Fenty began, saying it would be devastating for a mayor to “roll back all the gains we’ve made,” especially regarding school accountability.

She wasn’t afraid to criticize Gray for a lack of action on reforms from improving teacher quality to pushing for more technology in the classroom.

Until the boundary proposal, “I think his position has been, ‘Don’t make any waves, don’t cause any problems, just keep a low profile on schools,” Bowser said.

That won’t be the case for Gray’s successor.

“We have to make some decisions around what we want the landscape to be,” Thompson said. “This mayor has the opportunity to decide what that will be.”